Making New "New AI" Friends: Designing a Social Robot for Diabetic Children from an Embodied AI Perspective

Robin is a cognitively and motivationally autonomous affective robot toddler with “robot diabetes” that we have developed to support perceived self-efficacy and emotional wellbeing in children with diabetes. Robin provides children with positive mastery experiences of diabetes management in a playful but realistic and natural interaction context. Underlying the design of Robin is an “Embodied” (formerly also known as “New”) Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach to robotics. In this paper we discuss the rationale behind the design of Robin to meet the needs of our intended end users (both children and medical staff), and how “New AI” provides a suitable approach to developing a friendly companion that fulfills the therapeutic and affective requirements of our end users beyond other approaches commonly used in assistive robotics and child–robot interaction. Finally, we discuss how our approach permitted our robot to interact with and provide suitable experiences of diabetes management to children with very different social interaction styles.